The House approves another short-term extension to avoid a federal shutdown
WASHINGTON — The House passed another shortterm spending measure Thursday that would keep one set of federal agencies operating through March 8 and another set through March 22, avoiding a shutdown for parts of the federal government that would otherwise kick in Saturday. The Senate was expected to vote on the bill later in the day.
The short-term extension is the fourth in recent months, and many lawmakers expect it to be the last for the current fiscal year, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that negotiators had completed six of the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and had “almost final agreement on the others.”
“We’ll get the job done,” Johnson said as he exited a closed-door meeting with Republican colleagues.
The vote to approve the measure was 320-99. It easily cleared the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
At the end of the process, now expected to extend into late March, Congress is set to approve more than $1.6 trillion in spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 — roughly in line with the previous fiscal year. That’s the amount that former Speaker Kevin Mccarthy negotiated with the White House last year before eight disgruntled Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats a few months later and voted to oust him from the position.
Some of the House’s most conservative members wanted deeper cuts than that agreement allowed through its spending caps. They also sought an array of policy changes that Democrats opposed. They were hoping the prospect of a shutdown could leverage more concessions.
“Last I checked, the Republicans actually have a majority in the House of Representatives, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our checkbook because we are all too willing to continue the policy choices of Joe Biden and the spending levels of Nancy Pelosi,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-fla.
But Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-tenn., countered before the vote that shutdowns are damaging and encouraged lawmakers to vote for the shortterm extension.
Republican leadership said that the broader funding legislation being teed up for votes in the next few weeks would lead to spending cuts for many nondefense agencies. By dividing the spending bill up into chunks, they are hoping to avoid an omnibus bill — a massive, all-encompassing bill that lawmakers generally had little time to digest or understand before voting on it.
Republicans vowed there would be no omnibus this time.